In a so-called commercial printing industry where a reward is obtained from a third person by accepting an order of creation of a printed matter (such as a magazine, a newspaper, a catalogue, an advertisement and a photogravure) from the third person (a customer or a client), creating the printed matter desired by the third person and delivering it to the third person, there is mainly used a large scale printing apparatus such as an offset reproduction printing machine still now.
Conventionally, in the commercial printing industry, printing work has been performed through various processes such as document receiving, design or layout, comprehensive layout (presentation by printer output), proofing (layout modification or color modification), proof print, artwork creation, printing, post-processing and delivery. This is because artwork creation is indispensable to use such a printing machine as described above, and an elaborate proofing work, that is, an elaborate layout checking and color confirmation works are essential since modification of artwork once created is not easy and requires a high cost.
As described above, in such an industry, a large scale apparatus has been conventionally required, and a certain degree of time has been required to create a printed matter desired by a client. Furthermore, each of such works requires expert knowledge, and know-how of a skilled worker, a so-called artisan, is also required.
Meanwhile, recently, with realization of a higher speed and a higher quality of an electro-photography printing-apparatus or an ink jet printing apparatus, there appears a market called “print on demand” (hereinafter referred to as “POD”) which aims at handling a large number of copies or jobs in a short period without using a large scale apparatus or system, in opposition to the printing industry as described above. POD is intended to realize a digital print with the use of electronic data and run a business therewith by making best use of a digital image forming apparatus, such as a digital copying machine and a digital complex machine, instead of using a conventional large scale printing machine or printing method described above.
In such a POD market, digitalization has been more promoted in comparison with the conventional printing industry, and management and control utilizing computers has been spread. The level of the market is gradually approaching that of the printing industry to some extent by utilizing a computer. Under such a background, there exist PFP (print for pay), which is said to be a printing service provided by a copy/print shop and a printing company, CRD (centralized reproduction department), which is said to be a printing service to be provided within a company, and the like.
In the conventional printing industry and the POD market as described above, though it has been considered to provide a service for performing all the works of order placement/receiving, packaging, delivery, after-the-sale service, inventory management and money receiving management of a printed matter as a commercial product, more consideration is necessary.
In the printing industry and the POD market as described above, though it has been considered to provide a system capable of supporting management planning and management works through collection, processing and report of production related data and accumulating information to provide it to a department which requires it as necessary, realization and operation of an optimum such system has not been actually realized yet.
Furthermore, in the actual situation of the above-described POD market, it is not so easy to employ a skilled worker as in the conventional printing industry. Therefore, in spite of demands for completing a job at a low cost, running a business with less investment, reducing TCO (total cost of ownership) and the like, such demands are not sufficiently responded to because it is a new market, and there are problems to be solved.
The receiving forms of document data for printing are mainly classified into electronic data and paper data. When a document is received as paper data, it is necessary to perform processing for acquiring the data with a scanner to digitize it. However, when a paper document is read with a scanner, correction of the image quality or distortion may be required, unlike the case of receiving electronic data.
This correction work requires time and therefore causes increase in cost. Accordingly, various techniques for correcting a scan image have been proposed. For example, there have been proposed a technique for correcting distortion which may be caused by paper warpage at the binding portion in the case of receiving a document which is bound in (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-341230, for example) or a technique for taking a histogram based on the brightness of image data to adjust the color density of the image (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open 2002-84409, for example).
However, in the case of manually setting a paper document on a scanner or in the case of automatically scanning multiple sheets using an automatic document feeder (ADF), displacement may be still caused according to paper setting or feeding accuracy. Therefore, conventionally, when high quality output is required, such displacement has been manually corrected with the use of the above-described technique or an image editor by visually inspecting the screen of the image editor or a trial output of a printed matter, and this leads to increase in work cost.
Therefore, conventionally, even if position adjustment is performed, the position adjustment is often only adjustment of folio for which display displacement between the front side and the back side is noticeable, and alignment of the print position of pages is actually not performed.